And, indeed, as far as the feeling of nationality is concerned, the institution of knighthood itself, as it then existed, was calculated to prevent the growth of patriotic sentiment. For the commonwealth of chivalry was of European extent. The knights of England, France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, were brothers in arms, linked together by a community of thought and sentiment infinitely stronger than any which bound them to the other classes of their own countrymen. The aggregation of caste wholly overbore that of nationality. And the nature of the former, though not wholly evil in its influences, any more than that of the latter is wholly good, is yet infinitely narrower, less humanising, and less ennobling in its action on human motives and conduct. And war, the leading aggregative occupation of those days, was proportionably narrowed in its scope, deteriorated in its influences, and rendered incapable of supplying that stimulus to healthy human development which it has in its more noble forms, indisputably sometimes furnished to mankind. And it is important to the great history of modern civilisation, that these truths should be recognised and clearly understood. For this same period, which is here in question, was, as all know, one of great intellectual activity, of rapid development, and of fruitful progress. And historical speculators on these facts, finding this unusual movement of mind contemporaneous with a time of almost universal and unceasing warfare, have thought, that some of the producing causes of the former fact were to be found in the existence of the latter; and have argued, that the general ferment, and stirring up, produced by these chivalrous, but truly ignoble wars, assisted mainly in generating that exceptionally fervid condition of the human mind. But, admitting that a time of national struggle for some worthy object may probably be found to exercise such an influence, as that attributed to the Italian wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is certain that these latter were of no such ennobling nature. And the causes of the great intellectual movement of those centuries must therefore be sought elsewhere.